One of the things that President Donald Trump didn’t get enough credit for during his first amazing term in office was collapsing the economy of Cuba. The communist regime had managed to chug along for 58 years despite US sanctions. It even survived the collapse of the Soviet Union, which had propped Cuba up as a vassal state for decades. Cuba was once one of the largest sugar producers in the world. But ever since Donald Trump’s first term in office, they can’t even produce enough sugar for domestic consumption. Sugar costs $30 a pound right now, in fact.
Cuba’s government, the typically named commie “National Assembly of People’s Power,” met this month to address the crisis. Prime Minister Manuel Marrero Cruz spoke and recalled when Raul Castro once said it would be shameful if Cuba ever had to resort to importing sugar.
“Well, we are experiencing that embarrassment because we are importing sugar,” Cruz announced.
The Prime Minister says that the crisis is so bad that Cuba has stopped exporting sugar entirely. The country didn’t even have enough farm laborers to handle last year’s meager harvest. As a solution, they emptied out the prisons and put all the inmates to work. Now that Cuba’s economy is in a freefall, the price for a pound of refined sugar—which they have to import—is up to 600 pesos ($30 USD). Earlier this year, even unrefined bricks of brown sugar were up to 800 pesos a pound ($40 USD).
So, how did President Trump manage to collapse Cuba’s economy when the previous eleven administrations had failed?
One of the biggest factors was when Trump blocked remittances to Cuba. Remittances, for those who don’t know, are the cash payments that illegal aliens send back to family members in their home countries after they steal jobs from Americans. Illegal aliens from Mexico send about $55 billion a year home in remittances, which makes up about 4% of the country’s total economy.
Cuba is a obviously much smaller country than Mexico. Illegals from Cuba were sending an estimated $3 billion a year home. When Trump blocked remittances to Cuba, he cut off nearly 10% of the country’s GDP.
President Trump also blocked fuel deliveries to Cuba and deterred foreign investment there. One of Trump’s final acts in 2020 before he left office was to add Cuba to the US list of state sponsors of terrorism.
Many people don’t realize it since the media never reported it, but Cuba had been renting land to Hezbollah and other Middle Eastern terrorist groups to use for training camps. (If you know how we know that bit of classified information, it’s because it was hacked from former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s illegal server. Which she was never prosecuted for.) Iran and Saudi Arabia have been propping up Cuba’s economy by sending their proxy jihadi groups in for training before bringing them back home to the Middle East, where they just toppled Syria.
Normal sanctions against Cuba for the previous 58 years never had much of an impact. Trump’s sanctions hit the communist island where it hurts. Sure, it’s awful for the Cuban people to have to live under a communist yoke all these years. But imagine what Cuba could look like after a couple more years of a Trump administration.
The communist regime that has controlled Cuba could finally topple, reopening an island paradise not far off the coast of Florida. Cuba could end up becoming one of the top tourist destinations in the world by the time President Trump’s second term is up. And sugar will be affordable there again.